IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ris/wfuewp/0117.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Quantifying Racial Prejudices with Housing Transaction Data

Author

Listed:
  • Leung, Tin Cheuk

    (Wake Forest University, Economics Department)

  • Sun, Xiaojin

    (Oklahoma State University)

  • Tsang, Kwok Ping

    (Virginia Tech)

Abstract

This paper aims to quantify racial prejudices using transaction-level housing market data. We pin down the impact of a marginal change of racial composition in a narrowly-defined neighborhood on the price appreciation between repeated sales of a house, and we find that an additional nonwhite household within a radius of 0.2 miles reduces the price appreciation by 1.27 percentage points. The effects are weaker in neighborhoods with a thicker housing market and a higher income level, suggesting that the role of racial prejudices is limited by market forces. The effects are also associated with voting behaviors and public anti-racism statements made on social media, indicating that they are likely to be driven by taste-based racial preferences. While we also find evidence of racial price discrimination effects as in the literature, these effects tend to be a form of statistical discrimination driven by other factors that correlate with race.

Suggested Citation

  • Leung, Tin Cheuk & Sun, Xiaojin & Tsang, Kwok Ping, 2024. "Quantifying Racial Prejudices with Housing Transaction Data," Working Papers 117, Wake Forest University, Economics Department.
    • Handle: RePEc:ris:wfuewp:0117
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wusbqNPAB4yVrpni4c8NgxDDFtyQqsO7/view?usp=sharing
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Housing market; repeated sales; racial prejudices; machine learning;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H00 - Public Economics - - General - - - General
    • J15 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
    • R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population
    • R30 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ris:wfuewp:0117. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Don Shegog (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dewfuus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.